Tailoring site to seemingly inevitable, irrelevant Adsense ads...

Long-time lurker, first time poster and all of that...

Here's the scoop, I "inherited" a little site that draws decent traffic w/o much effort but is tough, tough, tough to monetize. Basically, it seems to attract a the kind of crowd who "don't use none of dem der credit cards, ya'll."

It's bad enough that Adsense will only run the dreaded "Get a Blog Here," "Wonderful Place to Blog," "Express Teenaged Angst Here," "Blog, Blog, Blog," etc. stuff. You know, the Dreaded Adsense You Don't Want.

So, I figure the traffic is good enough that if I could convert even a small % at a few cents/click it would more than pay for its costs and would actually be a cute little residual money maker, as it requires virtually no upkeep efforts.

Thus, I decided to run Adsense big and bad in a square above the fold while running the skyscraper down the left side (two separate skyscrapers, actually, with some recip links in the middle). Right above skyscraper 1 and below skyscraper 2, I added some encouragement.

Basically, I said "Hey, you can start your own cool site about Subject X, just find a free blog host and you'll be up and running in minutes." Only, of course, I said it more eloquently and replaced the variable with the actual site subject matter.

So, I have converted my Subject X site into a "Free blogs kick ass for fans of Subject X" site. And, lo and behold, it is working. CTR is surprising, to say the least.

Here's the deal, is this all cool with Adsense TOS, etc? I mean, I am not really soliciting clicks, but I am pointing out how cool it would be to find a wonderful free blog host...which, not coincidentally, is likely to be advertised within a twitch of my observation.

At what point are you just being crafty enough to monetize the otherwise worthless vs. when you are illegitimately pimping for clicks.

Opinion?

 

Just realized I foolishly placed this in wrong area.

Will correct and place in Adsense forum.

Apologies.